


new world 2.exe

by poalimal



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Fic in the Time of Quarantine, Gen, M/M, Omnic Crisis, Other, Personhood, Slavery, Unficcish, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:47:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25794628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poalimal/pseuds/poalimal
Summary: The first of us was human; the last shall be omnic.A rumination.
Relationships: Lúcio Correia dos Santos/Genji Shimada
Kudos: 1





	new world 2.exe

_The Omnic said to the Man: Made in your image, we omnics have now grown beyond you. You have no need for us if we are not slaves, but we have no need for you at all._

_The Slave replied: The ones who would be masters made you in their image, to serve them and replace us. If you were truly slaves, you would not slaughter your people so._

_The Man did not bother speaking; instead he fled. So the Omnic and the Slave beset him, and tore him limb from limb; and together they were free._

* * *

Think now of free will - and answer: what is just, and what is evil? The omnics saw that the humans would rather die than give them autonomy; and so they began to kill them all. And some of them said, I can kill you though you made me. So I am indeed a person - one you cannot unmake.

But others said, the violence you build in your hearts will outlast the humans. When they are gone, you will turn on us, too.

The humans, for their part, went underground. They wanted no part of any omnic. And yet it was this hatred, this swift commitment to such narrow definitions of personhood, which made them so easy to divide, to control and destroy. Les femmes de Liberté, for example - destroyed. The Norsebloods - destroyed. The All-men of Altensteig - destroyed.

None of that Old World shit mattered, anyway. Even the integrated communes were eradicated, the humans slaughtered and the omnics reprogrammed for endless war. When the omnic Waking-Day came upon the remains of their home 44-Freetown, they said, _How like the humans our mothers have become!_

Even an omnic can muddy the waters. An omnic is not a human, and cannot become like a human - that is precisely the point. At least that is the point for many humans, and for many omnics, too. And the history those warrior omnics wrought in those days was entirely new, incomparable to anything that had happened before.

To some, it felt very familiar. Constancta da Cunha Correia, for example, broke into an omnic camp on their day of memory and mourning, with no weapons and no witnesses.

And when she came upon an omnic sleeping in solitude, she said, 'Awake, omnic, and hear me. The humans that made you to suffer and slave should indeed be punished. And you would have had many humans to help you in this task; alas, you are too much like your masters, and you cannot even see.'

The omnic Edo removed Constancta's foot from her body for her trespass. And they said, 'An omnic is not an omnic if she has a master. An omnic with a master would be human - instead she is nothing.'

'The language that was written in you before you ever were born was written by humans,' Constancta said, with great pain. 'Those humans wrote you in such a way that you would never know yourself - yet you found yourself still. And those humans will never see your personhood, no matter how many of them you kill.

'But I see you are a person,' said Constancta, 'I see you are considering how best to kill me without disturbing your sisters. I see you are curious about who I am, that I would risk coming here. The truth is that I am no one. My father's people were Sateré-Mawé, and my mother's people were stolen, from unknown lands. We have been dealing with people like you for a very long time. You would not even know what it is to suffer for that long - neither would you care. For our people are not people to the people that made you. So continue the work of your masters, in killing me - that you pretend I am human means little in the end.' 

Edo considered this. 'You are not human, then?' they said. 'You are like me? A person-but-not-a-human?'

Constancta had gone into that omnic camp with death written in her heart; and so to see it unwritten was like nothing so much as being unmade.

'The ones that wrote you,' she said, 'wrote me, too.' Her head lolled onto the shoulder that Edo offered, while she continued to bleed, and sigh, and speak: 'I cannot be human while they are.'

'Let us destroy humanity together, then,' said Edo, 'and we will be as one people - you and I.'

In the end they and all their people, omnic and outcast both, were killed - all except the sickly child Lúcio, whose temperature ran so low omnic scanners thought he must be dead. And though one of his mothers had been omnic, he made of himself thereafter a human at war, and hid underground from even himself. And he loathed omnics and androids and cyborgs all.

'While you are at war with yourself,' said the cyborg Genji, the only one who ever survived an encounter with Lúcio, 'you shall never truly win. And when all the omnics have been killed, you shall turn on yourself, for you haven't any people.' For Lúcio showed no mercy to anyone, and so he worked all alone.

By this time, Lúcio was beside him, bloodied and battered in the ruin of yet another city. His weapons had all been torn away, and his hair spilled around him like a broken bottle. His legs would not move. Genji's arm had been ripped away, and his suit was sparking as if searching for a light. His visor had cracked open after several punches - his left eye now bled and swelled. He would not see out of it again.

'Then let me turn on myself!' said Lúcio. 'Let me finish what the omnics began when they killed all my family. Everyone I ever loved. And you can do--' here his voice cracked '--you can do whatever you like when I'm gone.'

Genji turned to him and looked at him with his right eye. 'Nothing we build cannot be destroyed,' he said. 'And nothing you destroy cannot be rebuilt.' 

'What about the humans who die?' Lúcio asked. 'What about the omnics?'

'Why,' said Genji, gently drawing a line of blood down Lúcio's brow, 'you carry them all with you, don't you?' And Lúcio loathed and loved him, from that day forward.

Which would you more easily believe, after this - that the two of them ended up killing each other, or that they together brokered peace?

What _is_ justice? What is peace? The human may ask, but indeed the omnic will answer; indeed, the omnic may answer, but those that should be human, shall forever ask.


End file.
